Open Source Lessons Learned: Two Years of Telescope
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Some discussions here reminded of this post, where the telescope developer wrote about the effects of making it opensource.
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So my first lesson was that open source is no magic bullet: just because you host your code on GitHub won’t automatically make people want to help you out.
First rule of doing anything collaborative online: hardly anyone will show any interest in helping out, and of those who do, only some actually will. (I learned that over 20 years ago already, writing game material instead of software, but I doubt that makes much difference.) It’s usually far better to simply do the work yourself and rope in a few people as testers, proofreaders, or similar and — vitally — not expect anyone to praise you for your hard work once you put it up for download.
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@wharrgarbl I'm not madly familiar with Telescope, and from reading that I'm madly confused. He links to producthunt, and talks about what a close-source success it is. But I can look at producthunt and see immediately what it is - its a website/app that contains a lot of content about the latest in tech. They're not pushing a platform, they're not selling that platform, they're providing content, and selling the eyeballs.
They built there community based on an interest in that content not an interest in building a platform for content.
In short- they have a business model. If Telescope has a business model, its hard to deduce what it is from this article.Is Telescope the company about building Telescope the platform, or Telescope the website?
If its about Telescope the website, where's the content? What differentiates them from Hacker News?Groovy modern user interfaces and frameworks are nice, but if there's no substitute for content.
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Discourse has 12000 stars
All of them shining out of Jeff's arse
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It's extremely difficult to make money from selling software tools. It's almost as hard to make it from selling a platform. You can make money from services and content, though those are also a lot more effort to put together (e.g., you need some sort of curation, and that requires employed people). OSS does best in the tools space, and reasonably well in the platforms space. It's not great for services and content, but you might do those by using selected OSS systems as part of your overall offering (assuming you've got a solid value-add on top).
Anyone not clear about what value they're bringing to market should GTFO.
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So I figured I would come out with a basic version of the app, make the project open source, sit back as pull requests poured in, and use the resulting improvements to make Sidebar even better.
Translation: "So I figured I'd be a lazy fuck and expect others to work for me for free."
This is probably obvious to anybody who’s paying attention to the open source world. But before starting this project, I have to confess I had no idea the workload distribution would be so skewed towards myself.
Translation: "I'm a special snowflake who thinks everyone is interested in exactly the same projects as me."
Open source projects need to target two groups of people: users and developers. Here’s the thing though:
at least in Telescope’s case,there is little overlap between these two audiences.FTFY
You see, I had initially made the naive mistake of assuming my end users would also be the ones who’d contribute code back and make Telescope better.
"When you assume something, you make an ass out of u. And don't expect sympathy from me."
I couldn’t have been more wrong. First of all, there’s only 24 hours in a day: the more time someone spends customizing their app and building up their community, the less time they have to contribute code back to the core codebase.
Time is limited. News at 11.
And secondly, there’s just no reason why people wanting to launch their own social news app would also happen to be developers. Yes, it turns out that a substantial amount of people don’t spend their days in front of a text editor. Who knew
!?Everyone but you, apparently. Also, that's a question, not an exclamation: use the right punctuation mark.
If you’re skilled enough to create a popular open source app, you’re probably skilled enough to write a book about doing it
I'm not sure that correlation exists.
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@RaceProUK said in Open Source Lessons Learned: Two Years of Telescope:
I'm not sure that correlation exists
Given how bad many open source developers are at documentation, I would suspect a negative correlation if any
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@RaceProUK said in Open Source Lessons Learned: Two Years of Telescope:
Also, that's a question, not an exclamation: use the right punctuation mark.
I would accept an interrobang
(inb4 quotes out of context)
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@Jaloopa Closed source developers are bad at documentation too, which is why "technical writer" is a job.
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@gwowen yeah, I guess it's just that closed source software (especially successful closed source software) is more likely to have hired someone specifically to write docs. If you're skilled enough to create a popular open source app you're skilled enough to work on a popular closed source app as well
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@Jaloopa True. There aren't many people who when asked "What do you do for your hobby?" answer "I really love to read, listen to music, and document API's"
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@gwowen said in Open Source Lessons Learned: Two Years of Telescope:
@Jaloopa True. There aren't many people who when asked "What do you do for your hobby?" answer "I really love to read, listen to music, and document API's"
I like to come to this one web forum and complain about poorly documented APIs. That counts for something, right?
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Looking back it seems blindingly obvious. Even for a huge project like the afore-mentioned Discourse, you can see that around 80% of code commits have been contributed by the five core team members.
You should of notice something here you Most of those people are paid or have a vested interested in making money off of it.
EDIT how do people like this not notice that most of the successful open source projects have millions of dollars of paid developer hours behind them.
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@DogsB said in Open Source Lessons Learned: Two Years of Telescope:
Chickenshock?
Yes, I know it's 'cock-socket'
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@Gurth said in Open Source Lessons Learned: Two Years of Telescope:
First rule of doing anything collaborative online: hardly anyone will show any interest in helping out, and of those who do, only some actually will.
It goes even further than that. First rule of any community, whatever the context, is that most people will be passive and won't contribute (apart maybe from speaking). See lurkers in a forum, contributors to open-source projects, housekeeping in a shared home, volunteering in a Real Life (tm) community etc.
(also and without going to the garage, this is one reason why communism doesn't work)
The only way to break that is to incentivize people to be active e.g. by paying them to do so (i.e. if your boss tells you to do something), but even so most people will do the minimum they can and a few key people will be the main actors.
That's how humans work.
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I was metaphorically shaking my head the whole time and saying "duh!" while reading that article.
What was that person thinking? What idealistic world do they live in?
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@Zecc said in Open Source Lessons Learned: Two Years of Telescope:
What was that person thinking? What idealistic world do they live in?
I think they fell for the "open source utopia" bullshit, the idea that we don't need companies and stuff, we just need to make everything open source and "the people" will take care of developing everything.
Hmm, that sounds familiar...
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@RaceProUK said in Open Source Lessons Learned: Two Years of Telescope:
Everyone but you, apparently. Also, that's a question, not an exclamation: use the right punctuation mark.
What.
It's perfectly fine in American English to end a rhetorical question with a period or exclamation mark. I don't know about you wacky Brits, but there was nothing wrong with that sentence.
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@blakeyrat even in Brit land this is ok, if atypical.
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@Arantor I'm a bit of a punctuation
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@RaceProUK understandable, and it is weird here but it still isn't wrong.
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@RaceProUK said in Open Source Lessons Learned: Two Years of Telescope:
I'm a bit of a punctuation
Which particular bit of a punctuation are you? The fob? The chain? The clasp?
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@dkf The jewel, obviously :P
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@RaceProUK said in Open Source Lessons Learned: Two Years of Telescope:
The jewel, obviously :P
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@blakeyrat said in Open Source Lessons Learned: Two Years of Telescope:
It's perfectly fine in American English to end a rhetorical question with a period or exclamation mark.
Is it.
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@blakeyrat said in Open Source Lessons Learned: Two Years of Telescope:
@RaceProUK said in Open Source Lessons Learned: Two Years of Telescope:
Everyone but you, apparently. Also, that's a question, not an exclamation: use the right punctuation mark.
What.
It's perfectly fine in American English to end a rhetorical question with a period or exclamation mark. I don't know about you wacky Brits, but there was nothing wrong with that sentence.
Would it be confusing. Does this rethorical question look fine for you.
INB4: It's not fine because the grammar suck
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@Zecc needs more Northern, as in, "Is it, 'eck as like."